Today in Bad Ideas That Just Won’t Die, Beverly Hills Cop 4. Recently, the news was that producer Jerry Bruckheimer, following his split with Disney after the flop ofcritics killed The Lone Ranger, is on the rebound with Paramount (meaning, sadly, that Jerry Bruckheimer will continue to make movies). Now comes word that the first project as part of the new deal will be a fourth Beverly Hills Cop, directed by everyone’s favorite shrimp-fetishist, Brett Ratner, and starring A Thousand Words actor Eddie Murphy.

The first project under the new deal, however, will be a new Beverly Hills Cop movie — a reboot of one of Bruckheimer and Paramount’s biggest successes together when he produced the original with late partner Don Simpson. Eddie Murphy closed his deal to reprise his role as Detroit cop Axel Foley — this time Foley will be returning to his Detroit roots. It will be the fourth installment of the lucrative franchise.

Hey, Deadline, either it’s a reboot or it’s a fourth installment starring the original star, it cannot be both.

Brett Ratner, who is currently finishing up Hercules for MGM, is attached to direct the film as soon as his duties on the Dwayne Johnson-starrer finishes up. The picture bows in July. The Beverly Hills Cop script is still being worked on.

If this story sounds familiar, it’s because Brett Ratner directing Beverly Hills Cop 4 was the talk of 2008, when Ratner told MTV that the target audience would be 10 and 12-year-olds (just like my pick-up lines). Since then, there were a few drafts of a script, which Eddie Murphy supposedly didn’t like (and we all know Eddie Murphy has great taste in scripts), and the project languished (as they say), eventually evolving into a TV show, which also went nowhere. But now that they’ve got the brains behind The Lone Ranger and the talent from Tower Heist? Hey, the sky’s the limit. I kind of just want to see the making-of documentary, where Ratner and his buddy James Toback drive around Hollywood talking about how great it’s going to be and spilling food on themselves.

Oh, and get your short shorts ready, because Top Gun 2 is supposedly back on too:

Another big Bruckheimer-Simpson-Paramount hit in their sights: Bruckheimer as part of his deal will also produce the long-in-the-works Top Gun 2, which is being developed by Skydance Productions with Tom Cruise back in the cockpit to star.

We last heard about this one in 2011, and it was supposedly dead a year later. If you’ll remember, this one was going to be about the guys who fly drones remotely from Nevada, rather than fighter pilots screwing and flying and playing homoerotic volleyball out of San Diego. So if you ever wanted to see Tom Cruise manage a team of brash video gamers in the desert, this could be your movie. It actually sounds more like a sequel to Grandma’s Boy, which wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Trippily enough, in The Color of Money (underrated), Cruise’s dopey character predicts that it the not-too-distant future, video game skills would be highly valued by the military. So ideally 2op Gun will star Cruise as a brash, low IQ pool-hustling Navy instructor whose uniform is a t-shirt that says “Vince.”

While watching Red Dragon I was struck by the colossal waste of money and decent acting talent. I mean, how can you mess up that story and characters so badly? It was almost willfully retarded. So you can imagine how excited I am about the quality turd that Ratner can spurt out using the leftovers from BHC3!

Maybe they should put both sequels in the same universe. This way we can see Axel Foley stick a banana in the tail pipe of Maverick’s jet engine. Did I just type that? Don’t worry, I’ll throw myself out of here.

No, because for all the “it’s cool to shit on Brett Ratner” that goes on here, he’s made a handful of decent action/comedy movies. Now, they may not be very acclaimed by the likes of fairly unknown stand up comedians or the butch nouveau Lesbian film critic set, but they tend to be a hell of a lot more entertaining in the popcorn-forgettable-“$10 worth of entertainment for a couple of hours” sense than anything hipster-Xenu Wes Anderson or oh-so-creepy Coen brothers make…but I guess some people don’t go to the movies to be entertained. They go to be depressed, or to be reminded that precious twee hipster bullshit is not forced kitsch, but genuine affectation for all things precocious and smug.

Personally, I’d love to see a Beverly Hills Cop movie done as a poignant self reflective drama about the unbearable weight of being a black cop working in the midst of white privilege, directed by either David Lynch, or perhaps Werner Herzog – said no one, ever.

Actually, if you look through Brett Ratner’s Directors credits on iMBD, he really hasn’t made taht many movies in general, and the ones he did direct weren’t really terrible. The Rush Hour movies are entertaining, in the same way any buddy cop movies tend to be. You can talk about the racism angle of the script, but most of that is Chris Tucker’s ad-libs. Tower Heist was actaully fairly decent if slightly underwhelming/anti-climactic. X-Men III wasn’t terrible, considering the mess he was handed. and After the Sunset is an underrated crime/heist comedy in the Donald Westlake/Elmore Leonard vein, which I happen to be a sucker for.

In fact – I can’t really find anything all that terrible he’s done. Nothing Oscar worthy, sure. So he’s Tony Scott but with less terrible CGI and more humor.

He’s done a bunch of TV and music stuff, but I don’t really count any of that.

To be honest, I think most of the criticism aimed at him on this site stems from people’s opinions of him as a person – which is kind of funny, since no one on here, not even the writers, actually know him personally, and everything is gleaned from exaggerated tabloid hyperbole.

expecting any sort of “credibility” in the comments section of a nerd movie blog. LOL. X-men III didn’t measure up to the first or X2, but in the relative scope of Comic Book movies of the last 10-12 years, it was about middle of the road. Nowhere near as good as Iron Man or the Avengers, WAY better than Green Lantern or Ghost Rider. For having a half-done shitpile of nonsense dropped in his lap at the last minute, X-Men III wasn’t nearly as bad as most people expected. I even remember this here little blog saying something very similar about that.